(Deena Shanker) The food industry has funded research in an effort to influence nutrition science and health policy for more than half a century, new research out Monday has found.

It’s no secret that industry funds such efforts today: An investigation in June, for example, showed how the National Confectioners Association worked with a nutrition professor at Louisiana State University to conclude that kids who eat sugar are thinner than those who don’t.

An article by University of California-San Francisco researchers, published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, shows how far back such efforts go: In 1965, the Sugar Research Foundation, the precursor to today’s Sugar Association, paid Harvard scientists to discredit a link now widely accepted among scientists—that consuming sugar can raise the risk of cardiovascular disease. Instead, the industry and the Harvard scientists pinned the blame squarely, and only, on saturated fat.